Thank you for smoking

At a trade fair in Germany in December three years ago Susan Bruce thought all her Christmases had come at once. She spotted the packaging she’d been looking for to take her family smokehouse business to a whole new level.

For 18 years Poachers Pantry had been producing traditional cured and smoked meat portions in vacuum packs but Bruce saw a future income stream in individual snack packs – and this was her moment.

“I had a little conniption," she says. Virtually on the spot she ordered the slicing and tumbling equipment that would revolutionise her production process.

For her business, based near Canberra, the following 12 months, she says, were “insane". She extended the factory, installed the machine and put on three-phase power. But in June 2011 the first Poachers Pantry snack packs were produced and revenue has doubled since that $250,000 investment.

Bruce says she now has the plant, equipment and suppliers in place to seize opportunities to deliver higher volume to the retail sector.

Qantas came on board early, ordering, for example, the three-part packs of smoked chicken, lavosh and tomato salsa, for economy-class passengers. The airline also uses larger Poachers Pantry smoked meat portions, like duck, for fresh meal service in first and business class.

But the savvy former stockbroker says that while she works on building the Qantas deal through changing flavours and concepts, she is seeking big volume with other clients.

Poachers Pantry supplies Woolworths, Thomas Dux, Harris Farm and IGA with a selection of smoked products, from lamb and ham to chicken and duck. There is even a kangaroo prosciutto and if you need ideas, there are recipes on the Poachers Pantry website.

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Bruce says manufacturing for the retail and food service sectors makes up 55 per cent of the business’s revenue, while the other 45 per cent comes through the on-site Smokehouse Cafe and growing wedding functions business, which is earmarked for further growth. The business even produces wine, from a small vineyard on the property.

Turnover is about $4 million a year, Bruce says, and has been growing about 30 per cent annually.

It all began down on the family farm, about half an hour north of Canberra, where Bruce settled with her husband, Robert, a sheep and cattle farmer. Robert’s extended family have been long-time farmers around Forbes, NSW.

As suburban Canberra encroached on surrounding farmland during the 1980s, Bruce and her husband knew “we had to make a living or we’d have to sell up and return to Forbes".

This was not the life British-born Bruce imagined when she first came to Australia in the late 1970s to study at the ANU and find her way into stockbroking as an industrial analyst with Bain & Co (now Deutsche Bank). She had grown up among the green and pleasant pastures of Hampshire, with an engineer father and a mother who was, she says, “a very good cook". She worked for a few years in the City of London as a clerk with Phillips & Drew before, she says, one wet and miserable day in November, she threw it all in.

She travelled overland to Australia, met Robert Bruce, married, went farming, did equity underwriting and had three children.

Poachers Pantry evolved after she and her brother, Michael Stride, lamented the lack of good smoked meat product in Australia. “We’d grown up in a family that enjoyed a culture of good food," she says. “We agreed the Australian smoked salmon was fantastic but the smoked meat was very ordinary."

In 1992 the Bruces built a small facility on the farm, bought a smokehouse at a second-hand auction for $4000 and Poachers Pantry began with Stride, a British-trained chef, overseeing production.

“It was quite labour intensive for the three of us," she says. They did about $15,000 of business in the first six months. “I had my Esky and I know the back door of most of the restaurants and hotels around Canberra. Now we do that amount before smoko."

That first smokehouse has only recently been retired, replaced by a $130,000 German model.

“It’s more reliable, more efficient and the power cost has been reduced dramatically as a result," she says. Of a power bill of up to $100,000 a year, 75 per cent is for refrigeration, a business imperative. Fresh produce, stock for market and working areas are all cooled and there are about 10 employees “curing, smoking, slicing and packaging" at any one time. Two butchers work on seasoning, flavouring and cuts.

Bruce remembers the first batch smoked was lamb, grown on their farm. Now it is supplied from Young in NSW. Chicken is from a Sydney wholesaler, delivered twice a week, the duck from Victoria and kangaroo cuts from a supplier in Adelaide.

She says she would be less inclined to start a food business again, given the massive compliance demanded in food production. “Hygiene is paramount," she says. “We’re rigorous about staff training and the cleaning processes every day." And they send off samples every month to a lab. It is a significant expense, she says, but “it’s our brand and our number one priority".

Her brother moved on about 15 years ago – “he got bored with smoked meat manufacturing," she says – and now owns the Fat Goose restaurant in beachside Killcare on the NSW central coast.

The Smokehouse Cafe was launched for Bruce by local chef Mel Hanns and her partner Joe Wagland, who remain at the helm. It opens from Friday to Sunday and serves some 500 people every week. She wants to build revenue by extending its use as a wedding venue.

Poachers Pantry already does about 40 weddings a year at a cost of up to $15,000 for 80 guests. She wants to double that number in the next 12 months, but do it carefully. As she has already learned in her 56 years – you need to be careful what you wish for.